Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana recently took to the podium to deliver the 2024 Budget Speech. During the speech, he gave details on how much will be spent on education.
He revealed that the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) will receive a budgetary allocation of R53.6 billion over the next financial year. This will enable the scheme to fund more than one million students in the 2024 academic year.
Before the budget
NSFAS anticipated a shortfall of R1.1 billion after 2023, projected to reach R5.5 billion considering a 10% budget cut for 2024.
Last year, NSFAS forecasted a budget of R41.9 billion for 2024/2025 to fund university students This was set to increase to R43.7 billion for 2025/2026. In addition, they received R9.7 Billion for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Colleges for 2024 and R10 billion for 2025.
This money would be used to comprehensively fund eligible students from working-class homes to obtain a tertiary education qualification. To qualify for the comprehensive bursary, students must not have a household income exceeding R350,000 per annum.
However, fiscal containment led the National Treasury to announce budget cuts across government departments. This includes a budget cut of R13.7 billion for tertiary education.
This caused some fears that students would lose their opportunity to receive the NSFAS bursary due to these budget cuts. Some even fear that NSFAS may move the goalpost by adjusting its funding criteria allowing them to fund fewer students.
However, the NSFAS funding criteria remained the same in 2024 for bursaries.
NSFAS Responds
At the time, NSFAS’ Ishmael Mnisi explained budget cuts will affect the higher education landscape including the work done by NSFAS. However, several measures will be introduced to circumvent the budgetary shortfalls.
We are putting plans to ensure that we circumvent such kind of shortfalls by budgeting appropriately and ensuring that every reserve that the NSFAS has is utilised appropriately, and distributed to needy students so that we avoid any losses of this revenue.
Mnisi also revealed that NSFAS had previously anticipated that they would increase the number of students being funded by the scheme.
However, with the shortfalls that might result from the revenue given to NSFAS, we acknowledge that we might keep this number even less than what we have funded.
The spokesperson said they were likely to fund less than one million students due to the budget cuts.
Other efforts were also made to reduce losses in cases where ineligible students receive funding. The fund lost approximately R5 billion by funding at least 40,000 students who exceeded the NSFAS household income threshold and received funding to study.
